Recent piece about the supposed resurgence of interent in surface mail -- 'old-fashioned' letter writing -- in the "upper echelons" of corporate America. I think that any apparent swing in this direction is temporary, and generational. As Doc Searles recently said, "Email is a slum," and who wants to put critical business communications through the cloaca of the American enterprise?

But the author opines that IM is not the answer -- for the wrong reasons:

Michael Kanellos

[from Dear Sir: The letter is back]

Most important, the cultural conventions of electronic communication have yet to be established. Security leaks and embarrasing disclosures have become far more common with the growth of e-mail.

Instant messaging is even more primitive. Most users tend to think of it as "instant response," where a reply should come fast, or else.

But the evidence from actual research on the power users of IM are exactly the opposite: its good for all sorts of talktalk, not just bursty, quick response.

But don't expect those "upper echelons" to go along with that. As Ray Lane recently said to me, "sometimes you have to wait for a generation to die off before real change can happen in the enterprise."